Libreoffice VS Openoffice
There was a time where choosing an open source office suite was an easy task. There was no doubt, no hesitation. Why? Because there was only one main, popular and well known office suite: Open Office. Then came Libre Office, and gone were the times where choosing an open source office suite was a no-brainer choice.
Now days people are wondering what the deal is with the LibreOffice vs OpenOffice fight. Is OpenOffice still maintained? What are the differences between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? We will answer those questions, and more, in this LibreOffice vs OpenOffice article.
How it all started
Actually OpenOffice was not absolutely the first main Office Suite available
to Linux users. It all started with Star Office, a proprietary,
and resource heavy, office suite from Star Division.
In 1999 Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and one year later, Star Office was released as an open source office suite: Open Office. Being actively developed by the OpenOffice.org community, OpenOffice rapidly became popular, and one of the most famous open source project.
In 2010 Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, and the development of OpenOffice was no more assured.
Libre Office
After the development of OpenOffice was discontinued, members of the
OpenOffice development team created The Document Foundation and released a new
office suite: LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice. Since then LibreOffice
was actively developed by The Document Foundation, new features were added
and bugs fixed. In the same time, as most of the OpenOffice.org community
developers were gone, the development of OpenOffice was stopped.
Finally, in June 2011 Oracle contributed the OpenOffice code
to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator.
The verdict
If Open Office is not dead yet, Libre Office is well alive. They are basically the same office suites, one being the fork of the other. But Libre Office has been more actively developed, is supported by a large community. The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator will without doubt be able to improve OpenOffice and to make it a real competitor to LibreOffice. But for now the winner of the LibreOffice vs OpenOffice "fight" is clearly LibreOffice.
